Wednesday, March 9, 2011

A fast one in Wisconsin

For this post I initially intended to go back to the topic of Asperger's and autism that I covered in the first post, but after what I saw on the news about the latest event in Wisconsin, I was so astounded that I had to write about that instead. What happened in Wisconsin is that State Senate Republicans, along with Republican governor Scott Walker, who showed signs yesterday of compromising with Democrats and giving up their efforts to bust unions in the state, pulled a fast one and got around the rules to push through union-busting legislation without Democrats present. In a desperate, undemocratic, ideologically driven move, Wisconsin Republicans subverted laws requiring an open process and took budget repair language out of the union-busting bill so they could pass it without the AWOL Senate Democrats, making it obvious that unions, not the state budget, was their target. This makes it more obvious than ever that those Republicans were going to stop at nothing to wage war on the middle class, following a series of extreme tactics to get the Democrats to return to the state. Recall efforts directed at the Republicans have been given great additional momentum in the wake of this outrage.

Wisconsin is not the only state in which Republicans have attempted extreme power grabs. They have done the same in Ohio, and in Michigan they are attempting something even more extreme, trying to give the governor authority to declare fiscal emergency and then be able to not only disband unions, but entire local governments. All of these unprecedented unpopular efforts have generated a huge backlash which is not likely to subside any time soon. This all confirms what I already knew, that this is class warfare, and this will not stand.